This article was missing the minimum amount of information I need to make an informed judgement on the situation. My Turner identifies two problems: That Americans are getting ripped off for broadband internet, and that America's typical broadband is technlogically far behind other countries. The article goes straight to the culprit without first demonstrating the problem.

I can't help but consider what an article on this topic would have looked like in The Economist... At minimum, I need the following two sets of data to make an informed judgement on the problems, even before identifying the culprits:

a) How much does a given bandwidth (say 3 Mbps down) home broadband connection cost, in $US, in the various countries? I need this info if I am to know if and how much Americans are getting ripped off.

b) How fast is a typical home broadband connection (in Mbps down)? How fast is an "enthusiast" cutting edge home connection? I need this info to know how much America is technologically falling behind other countries.

Both of these sets of data could be elegantly presented in chart form. As it is I am hard pressed to find a single quote of how much a given Mbps connection costs in any of the countries. It's also pretty critical to quantify, in Mbps, what a "super-fast" connection in France and Japan actually means.

Even the interesting tidbits, like Canada mandating fast upload speeds (3 Mbps) for broadband is missing context: So what if Canada has faster uploads? Is this mandate common to other countries or is this unique to Canda? Does this enable new applications for broadband in Canada? How does it change the quality of standard internet applications like web browsing, email, and gaming? (hint: not much) Is it designed to encourage users to run servers out of their homes? To enable faster peer-to-peer file sharing? How much does this add to the cost of providing broadband?

Articles on issues as important and interesting as this deserve in-depth research, and effective presentation of that research before reaching conclusions. Salon shouldn't be second rate journalism.

thanks,

David Sheldon

I was reading an article in The Economist recently. If you're not familiar with it, it's pretty free-market oriented and as such are often in favor of market liberalisation and lowering the tax burden, so I have no reason to suspect it of pushing Communist economics or anything.

Anyway, although it wasn't the focus of the article, The Economist cited a study done by mainstream, consensus economists on how much of a tax cut is normally recouped with higher tax reciepts due to more economic activity.

The figure was something like 30%. So, you get back in something like .30 on each dollar lost by cutting taxes. So I think you're mistaken that cutting taxes allows governments to spend more on services in a deficit-neutral way.

Put another way, if every dollar of reduced taxes actually returned more than a dollar in incresed revenue, then revenue would be maximized by reducing taxes to 0...

Maybe I misunderstood you are saying?

If revenge was really the motive, why not kill Saddam the moment he was captured as well as other regime leaders, without trial, and then leave to let the chips fall where they may in Iraq?

The architects of the war clearly believe two things that go well beyond revenge:

1. That Iraq would easily become a beacon for democracy and a stable ally. If they didn't believe this, they would have sent more troops or not bothered to try to set up a democratic government.

2. And, failing #1, that attempting to stabilize and/or democratise Iraq was worth the expenditure of massive amounts blood and treasure. Otherwise they would have cut'n'run a long time ago.

#1 turned out to be dead wrong. #2 is debatable. But neither looks like revenge...

Have you ever watched a fine right-wing news program called the Colbert Report? I think that type of satire was what flipside was getting at.

I think the iPhone has a whole lot of "gotta have it" goodness: It's an incredibly beautiful and appealing device. It will appeal very strongly to many fashion-concious buyers. It will also appeal to non-technical cell phone "enthusiasts". But, I can think of a few big possible problems:

1) The touch screen may require more attention than physical keys. I assume I'll have to look at the phone more often than a keypad, where I can do many things by feel (I can bring up my address book or dial a favorite by touch alone). Will voice commands mitigate this? Maybe, but this seems like a risk.

2) The phone features look extremely complex. Looking at the in-call UI, there are *SIX* options for what you can do while you're talking to someone. Most people only need one or two: hang up and switch to call-waiting. Granted, some of these extra options are very slick: Switching to the web browser while still on the call, but the complexity here may be off-putting for some - those who still want cell phones to be simple tools.

3) For all the cost and techo-wizardry of the multi-touch screen & OSX, many high-end users, especially business users, may not be satisfied: The connection speeds for data are not the fastest (~3G) and the phone cannot properly connect to an Exchange server, which are very prevelant in business. Some/many businesses also run custom apps on their smart phones. So, I think the iPhone may be prone to disruption by a slightly less elegant device that may be cheaper, and has these critical technical and business features.

4) Price

But, I think in the end, the cell-phone market is so large and so fashion-concious that Apple will many of the beautiful devices. But these problems may prevent is from being a huge mass-market hit. Much like the Mac I guess...